The Hidden City

He pointed to the western side where a slight rise marked the edge of the burial ground. ‘Let’s go,’ he told his friends. ‘I want to see just exactly what we’re up against.’
    They crossed the cemetery to the bottom of the rise, tied their horses to the trees growing there and carefully crept to the top. The basin was significantly lower than the floor of the surrounding desert, and there was a fair-sized lake nestled in the center, dark and unreflective in the morning shadows. The lake was surrounded by winter-fallow fields, and a forest of dark trees stretched up the slopes of the basin. There was a sort of rigid tidiness about it all, as if nature itself had been coerced thto straight lines and precise angles. Centuries of brutal labor had been devoted to hammering what might have been a place of beauty into a stern reflection of the mind of Cyrgon himself.
    The hidden valley was perhaps five miles across, and on the east side stood the city that had remained concealed for ten eons. The surrounding mountains had provided the building materials, and the city wall and the buildings within were constructed of that same brownish-black volcanic basalt. The exterior walls were high and massive, and a steep, cone-like hill, its sides thickly covered with buildings, rose inside those walls. Surmounting that hill was yet another walled enclosure with black spires rising on one side and, in startling contrast to the rest of the city, white spires on the other.
    ‘It’s not particularly creative,’ Bevier observed critically. ‘The architect doesn’t seem to have had much imagination.’
    ‘Imagination is not a trait encouraged amongst the Cyrgai, Sir Knight,’ Xanetia told him.
    ‘We could swing around the sides of the basin and get closer, Kalten suggested. ‘The trees would hide us. The ground around the lake doesn’t offer much concealment.’
    ‘We’ve got some time,’ Sparhawk said. ‘Let’s get away from the mouth of this tunnel. If it’s the only way in or out of the valley, there’s bound to be traffic going through here. I can see people working in those fields down there—slaves, most likely. There’ll be Cyrgai watching them, and there may be patrols as well. Let’s see if we can pick up some kind of routine before we blunder into anything.’
    Berit and Khalad made a dry camp in another cluster of jumbled boulders two days west of the place where they had seen the strange soldiers. They watered their horses sparingly, built no fire, and ate cold rations. Khalad spoke very little, but sat instead staring moodily out at the desert.
    ‘Quit worrying at it, Khalad,’ Berit told him.
    ‘It’s right in front of my face, Berit. I know it is, but I just can’t put my finger on it.’
    ‘Do you want to talk it out? Neither one of us is going to get any sleep if you spend the whole night wrestling with it.’
    ‘I can brood quietly.’
    ‘No, actually you can’t. We’ve been together too long, my friend. I can hear you thinking.’
    Khalad smiled faintly. ‘It has to do with those creatures,’ he said.
    ‘Really? I never would have guessed. That’s all you’ve been thinking about for the past two days. What did you want to know about them—aside from the fact that they’re big, ugly, savage, and they’ve got yellow blood?’
    ‘That’s the part that’s nagging at me—that yellow blood. Aphrael says that it’s because they breathe with their livers. They do that because what they’re used to breathing isn’t air. They can get along here for a little while, but when they start exerting themselves, they start to fall apart. The ones we saw the other day weren’t just running around aimlessly out there in the desert. They had a specific destination in mind.’
    ‘That cave? You think it might be a haven for them?’
    ‘Now we’re starting to get somewhere,’ Khalad said, his face growing intent. ‘The Peloi are probably the best light cavalry in the world, but Klael’s soldiers are almost as big as Trolls, and they seem to be able to ignore wounds that would kill one of us. I don’t think they’re running from the Peloi.’
    ‘No. They’re trying to run away from the air.’
    Khalad snapped his fingers. ‘That’s it!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s why they break off and run back to those caves. They aren’t hiding from the Peloi. They’re hiding from the air.’
    ‘Air is air, Khalad—whether it’s out in the open or inside a cave.’
    ‘I don’t think